Juno POSITION & STATUS

View of Juno’s position on Sept. 17 from NASA's Eyes on the Solar System.

As of Sept. 16, Juno was approximately 13 million miles (21 million kilometers) from Earth. The one-way radio signal travel time between Earth and Juno is currently about 71 seconds. Juno is currently traveling at a velocity of about 23 miles (37 kilometers) per second relative to the sun. Velocity relative to Earth is about 7 miles (11 kilometers) per second. Juno has now traveled 951 million miles (1.53 billion kilometers, or 10.1 AU) since launch.

The Juno spacecraft is in excellent health and is operating nominally. All science instruments are powered off except for the magnetometer experiment, which continues to operate in low-power mode.

Recent spacecraft significant events

With less than one month to go until Juno’s Earth flyby gravity assist, the Juno mission operations team successfully executed a trajectory control maneuver (named TCM-7) using Juno’s attitude control thrusters on Sept. 9. This maneuver further refines the spacecraft’s trajectory in preparation for the Oct. 9 flyby.

Juno is, technically speaking, already on course for Jupiter arrival in July 2016. The spacecraft must still fly by the Earth to receive the gravity assist it needs in order to reach Jupiter, but the recent set of trajectory control maneuvers put Juno on the required path to achieve its gravity assist as planned.

The spacecraft reached perihelion – the closest point in its current orbit around the sun – on Aug. 31. From that point onward, the sun’s rays will become increasingly faint. When Juno arrives at Jupiter, the arrays will produce about 450 Watts of electric power from a mere four percent of the light we receive at Earth’s distance from the sun.